The Best (& Worst) Exposure Tests for Resin 3D Printing

this video is brought to you by the curious critters of whimsy aisle kickstarter have you ever wondered if there's a magical setting for your resin 3d printer that can take your prints from good to pretty much perfect well there is a setting that can do that it's called exposure time and there are a whole bunch of tests you can use to find your perfect exposure time to get those sharp prints the problem they're just too many tests i mean look at this there's the xp finder these regal cones this cute town ground control to major this tensegrity looking thing and that's just a little taste the good news is i've tried them all so you don't have to and i'm going to explain the pros and cons of each and every one of them to you so you can save yourself time know which ones you should use and get the sharpest prints you're capable of getting with whatever resin you want to use all of that coming up next [Music] hey there i'm danny the 3d printing dm and welcome to 3d print tabletop a channel where we cover all things 3d printing for your tabletop games today's video focuses on what is absolutely the most important setting for resin 3d prints exposure time what it is why it's so important and how you can find that magical number for the resin you're using via the tests i'll be sharing with you all throughout this video now before we dive in we need to first talk about what exposure and exposure time is the way most home resin 3d printers work is that the slicer software splits up the model into layers and the printer bed drops down to the screen which is usually an lcd screen like the one in your phone it lights up that layer hardening that layer and then the bed lifts popping it off the screen then it does it all over again until you have a beautiful finished print now the exposure time is how long the uv light stays on for hardening each layer when you hear the terms overexposed or underexposed and that means the resin will be shrinking too little or expanding too much and both of those things can lead to failed prints blobby or flat-out missing details or maybe difficult to remove supports and those are all terrible to deal with which is why i'm making this video now if you're wondering why can't we just find the perfect exposure and share it online some people do and lychee slicer has this new community based profile feature but a lot of the times if using a new resin you don't have those features and you don't have examples online of people using it because it's not very common and every resin brand has its own optimal exposure time and this exposure time can also be varied based on your printer so it's complicated and you might still need to find your specific circumstances optimal exposure time and then you're dealing with minis which is even more complicated because they come pre-supported some pre-supports are thicker than others so finding the perfect exposure time that works and doesn't fail is even harder not saying all this stuff to scare you i'm just want to stress the importance of having a good exposure time locked in so you can feel confident and comfortable with your prints so now that we're on the same page in terms of what and why exposure time is so important let's get to the exposure test shall we first i'd like to tell you about today's sponsor the curious critters of whimsy aisle kickstarter the curious critters kickstarter is a collaborative project of velrock's awesome modeling and jamushka's fantasy illustrations combined to bring you an stl bundle of 13 characters 4 familiars and 3 mystical trees each miniature has a unique theme in mind for dnd 5v content and is super charming and extra cute this little bat rogue the swindler is my favorite personally in addition to the core bundle even more characters and content are planned for stretch goals including an entire source book an adventure set on the island if you'd like to test print one of the critters yourself the fiery hot tempered dragonborn adventurer puck you can visit the kickstarter page right now and find the link where you can download puck absolutely free visit the link down below in the description and pledge today to become the newest denizen of the wonderful whimsy aisle thanks for sponsoring content creators barack and jamushka and now back to our exposure tests we're going to start with what i call the flat tests these are tests that are obviously flat in general flat exposure tests are faster very difficult to fail easier for cleanup and removal and they are famous for their billions of circles lines letters and these bar things which feel very crop circley to me and just as mysterious as the results you'll get let's start with what i consider to be the most popular exposure test the original xp2 calibration matrix if you've spent any amount of time on a resin 3d printing form or facebook group you've probably seen this test before it's the red delicious of exposure test very common and kind of bland in my opinion now this test strength is its ability to help you begin to visualize over and under exposure the circles on the left show the blobbing that can occur and how details can get softened if exposure is incorrect but that is also one of the weaknesses of this test it's super subjective look at the difference between these tests and tell me which one you think is better keep in mind we're looking at this with a microscopic lens that's zooming in and i still struggle to determine what is perfect or not for those of you wondering anti-aliasing is turned off can you see what i mean though about how the exact answer might be difficult to interpret the part of this test i like best though is that center piece where the two triangular sections meet if the tips of the triangles are touching almost perfectly then your exposure is locked in and in theory dimensional accuracy of that box should be perfect too but dimensional accuracy is kind of another thing has different requirements than say miniatures in terrain but we'll talk more about that later so since this is such a fast printing test and such a popular one it's easy to share and ask for help interpreting the results so it's used a lot as a result and if you're interested in the xp2 test there is an improved version of this test that i would recommend instead and it's the dennis wayne thicker validation matrix it's the same test only with the thicker base with the original matrix you have to lower the amount of initial overexposed layers which are often called burn-in layers so that the results are accurate but with the dennis wein version with increased thickness it's big improvement because it removes the risk of those early burning layers messing up the test results now dennis wayne also has his own exposure test which you might have seen uncle jesse using quite a bit this test is much simpler the thing to look for is that the small supports on the inside print and that it's nice and uniform and i like using this as a bed level check honestly rather than an exposure test the test printing is about the only thing i know from this like i just said maybe it's just because i don't understand the test very well but there isn't as much to compare from what i can see just that it prints well so i don't really know if i'd be able to tell whether a 0.5 difference of exposure is really going to make a difference and it's a nice looking test but i guess i don't get it that's just me though next up we have a similar alternative to the xp2 that is the frozen xp finder as you can probably imagine this was created by frozen and is a similar square flat test much like the previous test it's thicker than the photons xb2 and i like some of these visual references more the corners for example that actually helped me see exposure differences easier the best part for me of this test is that it has result instructions or interpretation guidelines whatever you want to call it and i know for some people this stuff is self-explanatory but i'm a normie i don't get tech stuff without a lot of practice or help and it just doesn't come naturally to me so any test that has instructions will automatically get a ton of bonus points for me so 10 out of 10 frozen well done but this is not a perfect test it's still difficult to read and determine which is best just like the previous flat tests for example with this text i can see there's middle ground but i can't really be sure it's the right one just that it's the best of the examples i've printed and while good that isn't ideal to prevent failures from supports like i mentioned earlier so while this test is better than the xp2 its best strength is still helping you get within a decent starting range in my opinion after the frozen xp finder we have the photocentric xy full test the good one of the pluses of this test is that it works as a full bed exposure test or a lot of the bed depending on your bed size i like this star and these two xy squares they're very easy and simple to measure dimensional accuracy this test also feels very hollywood star to me the text the layout everything just comes together beautifully thank you so much thank you i love you unfortunately to start off with the bad this test also works as a full bed exposure test let me save you 50 milliliters of resin just run a full bed exposure print with two layers or if you're just checking that your light source works remove the fvp run it and then make sure the light is on evenly there you go save you some money and time the other thing this test reminds me is that even hollywood stars can be milk toast this is definitely the most bland test on this entire list at least the frozen xp2 has those decorative corners to look at and you don't need all this extra stuff to be this tall all of these other flat tests provide similarly ambiguous results without like a million extra layers end up looking like simcity print once it's uh finished okay so the matter hackers resin test tile this test has nothing new to offer that the other tests don't already offer and maybe that's the reason i hardly see it shared online now initially i saw they have an article with some instructions and that got me super excited at first but here's all it says there are seven hex tiles in the print and each demonstrates a particular geometric condition for layer cure time we mainly need to make sure that all the tiles are successfully printed well looks like they successfully printed so perfect exposure right no this is basically the worst results explanations ever please if you're using this test these instructions are only for the matter hackers build resin and successfully printed is about as low as standard as you can go for optimizing your exposure via tests so just keep that in mind it also means that this test is not very good for 99 of people low science i'll give it a few points but still this test is straight to jail to recap on the flat tests as you can probably tell these tests are best used as a general rangefinder if you don't have any idea about what exposure time to start with and in my opinion these tests aren't very good at helping with printing miniatures because of how reliant minis are on supports and these tests don't test for supports at all there aren't any height tests and definitely no support tests i wanted to take a moment to thank my patrons over at patreon for their amazing support if you've been enjoying the video so far please consider supporting us on patreon it's the best way to make sure we can keep making videos like this one gives you access to our patrons only discord and i have all of my resin profiles over on patreon as well now it's time to move on to what i call the hybrid exposure tests so these tests do have flat components but a lot more angled components too so they're looking to test more than just exposure and dimensional accuracy like testing how thick pillars can be while printing at an angle our first test in this category is the psoriatech test model and this test is barely on the cusp of being considered a flat test to me but the cube and the arch are what tipped it over this cube's a common test print on a lot of printers because it's supported and has a lot of different patterns that are hard to print and very easy to see if they printed well or not and as you might imagine the supported part of this test is huge for me because i mostly print miniatures and you'll recognize the triangles from the photonster xb2 test as well besides that you'll recognize a lot of the same data points as on the other flat test except for the arch and the cube and if your interdimensional accuracy the arch height also has a five millimeter clearance too so you won't just be worrying about xy accuracy but z accuracy as well next up we have the 3d resin solutions chip test i call it the pool lounge chair test because it's totally got that vibe for me this test is really interesting to me because of presentation it's a lot more interesting to me than say simple numbers squares holes and circles as you can probably tell by now i prefer full words to numbers and measurements because it's much easier for me to interpret this test also has stress tests not just results like these little thin resin strands the best part of this test and the next test the starship tests are the absolutely amazing and easy to understand test result explanations they include all of the detailed dimensional accuracy for the nerdy number folks as well as the simple why and what explanations for the people like me to understand how many of these little thin thingies i should expect to get on my test among other things now the starship test is an improved version of the chip test that is bigger has more stress tests and simply looks cooler gives me very radiant vibes i really like the angled pillars because these mimic pre-supported pillars at an angle they don't hold anything but seeing how thick and how strong they are is something that's really valuable if you're trying to lock it in it won't get you exact data but it's nice to understand conceptually either way now between the two of these i'd absolutely print the starship test they're right it does look really cool and again 10 out of 10 to the 3d resin solutions team for such an awesome instructional guide this is definitely one of my favorites on this list now our final category of exposure tests are tall tests which are obviously taller tests these are generally easier to interpret they take significantly longer some even taking over an hour but these tend to be much better at testing for real-life print scenarios because they consider things like supports we're going to begin with the cones of calibration by table flip foundry full disclosure table flip foundry has done work with us in the past they did our pre-supports for our last kickstarter uncharted lands but this test is completely separate from that and it's something they've shared openly with the community now this is a relatively new test and it's really meant for folks printing miniatures and anything that uses supports what this test does is it tells you the optimal exposure time where your pre-support should still print the results are really easy to read too on the success side you want the success cone on the right to be completely formed while on the failure side you want there to be as little pillars formed as possible and if you have one side full and the other side empty it's about as perfect as you can get it and that's your exposure number if you still have some pillars forming on the top of the failure side you're still really close i love this test because it's super clear super easy to read and understand it might take a bit to wrap your head around it but there are clear instructions to make it really easy for you to read and it'll click for you pretty quickly once you start running the test for yourself at least it did for me i know there's some kinks like this test not working as well with room settings but i also know they're actively working on this test and so it's going to get new versions released as they continue to get feedback from the community which they do via their discord server which i think is really cool now if you're printing miniatures or using anything that uses supports this test is a must-have in my opinion keep in mind this test is meant for pre-supported miniatures that often use pretty fine supports like 30 micron tip diameter so if you're doing your own supports and using really thick supports it likely won't make much of a difference for you all right on to the amira labs town this is another super popular test definitely prettier according to them it's made to keep or give as a present to a friend i'm not sure about giving it to a friend but it is much nicer to look at than many of the other exposure tests on this list what i love the most about this test is again the detailed test information they provide via a guide a lot of it's probably too detailed for a casual user like me it talks about adjusting things like pigment concentration viscosity resin polymerization but what i don't love about this test is an issue we had with earlier tests the results are just hard to read the calibrations rely on measurements of things like openings and again microscopic differences it's kind of a pain to do at the end of the day if you want to go further in depth and focus on things like resin quality and dimensional accuracy this test would be the right test for you i think and their calibration document will show you exactly how to use it for said purpose now this next test the slicer supports pull test geometry as it's titled on thingiverse is another test meant for pre-supported miniatures if you set it up properly you can see for yourself what level of pre-support your own machine can take and the size of support that will successfully hold this top piece here it ends up looking like a tensegrity piece to me which is kind of cool uh for its self-described purpose this works well but what i don't like about this is that it requires manual work to go in and i know that sounds lazy of me but hear me out it is lazy of me and how can you blame me when we have so many other tests that are just plug in print you can use the pre-generated ones which i did but this is the only one that printed for me and i know the settings i used for this are dialed in well so for me the test didn't really work very well if you like to do your own testing then this does save you some work if you want to kind of do everything yourself now i know that was a lot of tests it was literally everyone i could find out there even after asking facebook twitter discord but i think it's important to run these and try them all out so that we can find the best solutions for our community that help us get the best results possible thanks again for watching don't forget to like this video to subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and i'll see in the next one happy printing and happy gaming [Music]

Channel: 3D Printed Tabletop

Views: 194,926

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Id: RkLmm3zeVF8

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022